5. The legend of the Loch Ness Monster goes back nearly 1,500 years.
There’s a story written in 565 A.D. about an Irish monk traveling across Scotland. Once there, Saint Columba heard tales of a “water beast” that attacked and killed the locals when they went to the banks of the river. Offering to help, the monk used his friend as a bait to draw the beast into sight, at which point Columba told it to “go no further,” and the monster stopped and swam back upstream.
The river in Scotland is now known as the Ness River, which comes from the famous Loch Ness monster.
6. The famed “Typhoid Mary” infected more than 50 people by cooking for them.
“Typhoid Mary” was a real historical figure who became famous (or in this case infamous) in the early 1900s. Mary Mallon was an Irish woman who had immigrated to the United States in the 1880s. While she had no signs of typhoid fever, she had the bacteria in her blood and could transmit it to other people.
Because no doctor could convince her that she had the bacteria even though she didn’t feel sick, she insisted on continuing working as a cook. During her career, she contaminated at least 51 people, three of whom died before she was placed in forced quarantine for the last decades of her life.
